The Secret Ingredient For Incredibly Flavorful Pulled Pork Is Bacon Fat

If you haven't made pulled pork before, you really should. It's not only a great, cost-effective way to get a ton of meals out of one cut of pork, it's also remarkably easy, even for first-time cooks. You just season your pork shoulder or pork loin, put it in a slow cooker with a few other ingredients, and eventually pull it apart. It's a great way to learn how to cook (especially how to season) without the pressure of fancy cooking techniques.

There are, however, certain ways to amp up your pulled pork — and thankfully, they're ways that don't make the process any more difficult. One of the best ones involves the home cook's secret magical ingredient: bacon grease. The process here is simple: you just slather on bacon grease to the partially-cooked cut of pork (before you've pulled it apart), then let it melt across the surface and infuse your meat with even more savory flavor.

Bacon grease is the magic ingredient everyone should have some of but not enough people keep it on hand. You can use it in all sorts of applications; it's a miracle on breakfast potatoes or as a substitute for (or combination with) butter in scrambled eggs. It's fantastic on grilled cheese sandwiches, and you can even use it in something like refried beans. It combines with pretty much everything, providing a pop of savory flavor without adversely affecting texture.

But though there are surprising uses for bacon grease, combining it with pulled pork isn't one of them — only because it's not surprising at all that it works so well. Combining a pork product with another pork product is a time-honored tradition (it's why Cubanos are such a great sandwich), so pulled pork and bacon grease are a match made in heaven.

This trick works with pulled pork that's been smoked in a BBQ smoker, but it works just as well if your pork is made in a slow cooker. The point is just to let the grease melt and get into the meat, so how you cooked it doesn't affect this technique's viability. And you're not going to have leftover grease to deal with after this — which is good, since pouring bacon grease down the drain is something you should never, ever do.

The only other key here is remembering to do this partway through the cooking process. You can do it at the end, of course, and it won't taste bad; but you're not going to get the full benefit that way. You want to give the bacon grease a chance to cook into and with the meat itself, and partway through the process is the best way to accomplish that.

All in all, this trick isn't just easy, it's super effective. Try it yourself some time and enjoy the results.